1. 班級：碩研科管二甲 姓名：張心穎 學號： MA0Q0205

2.  ERP is essentially an integrated software system consisting of mulit-module application and a common database. Such software systems help coordinate business activities and facilitate the flow of information across an enterprise.  ERP eliminates data redundancy, enhances accuracy, and facilitates online information retrieval.

4.  SAP, started in 1972 by five former IBM employees in Mannheim, Germany.  SAP applications provide the capability to manage financial, asset, and cost accounting, production operations and materials, personnel, plants, and archive documents.  As of January 2007, SAP, a publicly traded company, had over 38,4000 employees in over 50 countries, and more than 36200 customers around the world.  SAP is turning its attention to small-and- medium sized businesses.

5.  Pantaloon Retail decided to implement SAP to keep itself competitive in the rapidly growing indian market.  There was a need for a reliable enterprise wide application to help run its business efficiently.  The basic need was to have a robust transaction system.  Looking for a solution that would bring all of its businesses and processes together.

6.  Pantaloon retail is the flagship enterprise of the future group.  The company owns and and manages multiple retail formats that cater to a wide cross-section of indian society.  Headquartered in Mumbai(Bombay), the company operates through four million square feet of retail space, has over 140 stores across 32 cities in india and employs over 14000 people.

7.  It has recently launched its e-business venture futurebazaar.com.  The group also has joint venture companies with a number of partners including French retailer, Etam group, Lee Cooper, Manipal Healthcare, Talwalkar’s, Gini & Jony and Liberty Shoes.

8.  Qualities of SAP retail solutions  Sourcing and procurement  Optimise cost, quality, and speed-variables that must be weighted differently as business needs, buying plans, and market demand patterns change.  Managing the supply chain

9.  The implementation was outsourced to a third party.  Done by SAP team with the help of Novasoft.  Some people from Pantaloon also assisted in the project.  24 qualified people worked on this SAP implementation.  SAP was chosen as the outsourcing party on a turnkey basis.  This project was headed by Pantaloon’s Chief information Technology Officer Chinar Deshnande.

10.  The first phase involved blueprinting existing processes and mapping them to the desired state.  In the second phase, the SAP platform was developed with the help of Nova soft template which was predefined by SAP after evaluation of Pantaloon’s needs and expertise in retail solutions.  The last phase in this project was for stores to switch over to the new system and for current data to be ported.

11.  The difficulties were faced during the data migration and in managing the interim period when the project was underway for about six months.  Migrating unorganised data to an organised format is a challenging task.  Pantaloon has not been able to see immediate benefits from this implementation.  This application certainly has long term benefits which will be seen when the performance of various aspects will be analysed.

12.  This application is currently being used by around 1200 employees across the organisation.  For maintaining this implementation and its related applications, Pantaloon has an in-house team and it has outsourced ABAP resources.  They are also in the process of setting up a SAP Competency Centre.  The system runs on a HP Super fome server on HP UNIX 11i and the database is from Oracle.  The cost of this project was about $10 million.